Ansible HAProxy Setup

Configure HAProxy and Apache Server over AWS RedHat using Ansible Roles and Ansible Plugins

Requirements

To launch instances over AWS, we need boto and boto3 library to be installed in system.

$ pip3 install --upgrade pip #to update pip in your system

$ pip install boto boto3

You also need to provide AWS credential so that Ansible fetch the account details. For this, create one IAM account in AWS. For providing AWS credential, set the environment variables for your Secret and Access key:

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID='YOUR_AWS_API_KEY'

$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='YOUR_AWS_API_SECRET_KEY'

Now Install Ansible in your system using pip command, so that Ansible is installed with python3.

$ pip install ansible

Usage

After follow above steps, Clone this repo in dir /etc/ansible...

$ git clone https://github.com/gaurav-gupta-gtm/ansible_haproxy.git /etc/ansible

Ansible Roles

1. ec2_host:

This role create key-pair in AWS and stored it in local path, created different security group over AWS for both loadbalancer & webserver, and launches EC2 instances over AWS tagged with webserver and lbserver.

2. web:

This role configure HTTPD server over the instances which we launch using ec2_host role tagged as webserver.

3. lbserver:

This ansible role helps in setup loadbalancer over EC2 instance tagged lbserver which we launched using ec2_host. This dynamically configure the loadbalancer config file and copy it to destination OS.

Ansible Plugins:

To setup dynamic Inventory hosts/main_aws_ec2.yml over AWS, it uses plugin amazon.aws.aws_ec2. This dynamically fetch Instance Over AWS and provide tag to them which we set.

plugin: amazon.aws.aws_ec2
regions:
  - ap-south-1
keyed_groups:
  # add hosts to tag_Name_value groups for each aws_ec2 host's tags.Name variable
  - key: tags.Name
    prefix: tag_Name_
    separator: ""
hostnames:
  - ip-address

Playbook

• lb.yml

- hosts: localhost
  roles:
          - ec2_host
- hosts: tag_Name_webserver
  remote_user: ec2-user
  roles:
          - web

- hosts: tag_Name_lbserver
  remote_user: ec2-user
  roles:
          - lbserver

Run this playbook for configure whole setup:

$ ansible-playbook lb.yml

To know more, visit the blog: https://techq.medium.com/how-to-deploy-haproxy-loadbalancer-over-aws-in-a-dynamic-way-using-ansible-plugins-a5ce7eda2495